Since we now have an excellent new host (the bod.westeros.org:3000 should now be working, btw), as well as some other good news to report, we felt it was time for one of these, albeit a brief one. The CharGen is not yet finished, but what we do have now is a brand new integrated mail and bulletin board system. Based off Elendor’s excellent system, Talvo’s mushmail uses mySQL to store the data, and offers a number of interesting features. We’ll now be working on integrating it with some of our existing systems, such as the code for tracking projects and player inquiries and the character request code, and it will allow us to finish up various outstanding pieces of code.
The new address for the MUSH will be bod.westeros.org:3000. This address will become functional shortly, but in the meantime 69.56.178.186:3000 can be used to connect to the game.
We’re happy to be able to report that we have a new host for Blood of Dragons. We don’t yet have the precise address that we’ll be using, but the game will now be hosted on the same server as the website, allowing us to proceed with plans such as making the character database accessible through a web-interface.
As soon as the game is up at the new address, we’ll post to announce this.
Unfortunately, we have some very bad news. Our current host, mux.net, will be closing down in two months, leaving Blood of Dragons without a home. Those who have logged on recently will know that the timing is about as bad as it could be, as we have recently been preparing to finally open for beta play sometime relatively soon after the US release of A Feast for Crows.
At this time, we have no solution for this problem. There are many commercial hosts out there, but quite a few don’t take PennMUSH (and changing to something else is not an option for us) or offer mySQL databases. Furthermore, we aren’t sure we can manage a commercial host financially in any case. We will be investigating what other options may exist, however, and if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Despite our work being a little disrupted by the server’s downtime, we have now reached (and done much work on) the Assets & Flaws section of the CharGen. We are also working on finalizing the INFO (NEWS) files to be able to upload those to the game and to the website.
Blood of Dragons is now back up, thanks to the hard work of mux.net’s site admin following an attack on the server. Please note, however, that the port is now 3000.
At the moment, our host (mux.net) is down, which of course means that Blood of Dragons is down too. Unfortunately, we have no idea what is wrong with the server as our only way of contacting the site admin is through is mux.net email. Hopefully, the downtime won’t be too lengthy, but at the moment we can’t say anything about when the game might be up again. We’ll just have to hope its nothing serious, especially since we were making good progress with the CharGen before this happened. As soon as we know something more, we’ll post again.
We’ve now finished adding the batch of houses we created during the summer to the character database. This brings us up to a total of 1767 characters. Of these 13 are Features, 623 are Closed (due to being dead, too young or unable to be in King’s Landing), 171 are Restricted and 960 are Open. So, there ought to be something for everyone in there, or so we hope.
A few more characters will be added later on, but almost all of these will be Features, so the characters currently set to Restricted or Open are pretty much a definitive list of the characters which will be available for players to chose from.
Since we’ve had a few people comment about the lack of updates, here’s some information on what we’re doing at the moment.